10 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF 



thoroughly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the 

 mythical compound, are now not only known, but no- 

 torious. 



I have not met with any notice of one of these Man- 

 like Apes of earlier date than that contained in Piga- 

 fetta's " Description of the kingdom of Congo," * drawn 

 up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor, Eduardo Lo- 

 pez, and published in 1598. The tenth chapter of this 

 work is entitled " De Animalibus quae in hac provincia 

 reperiuntur," and contains a brief passage to the effect 

 that " in the Songan country, on the banks of the Zaire, 

 there are multitudes of apes, which afford great delight 

 to the nobles by imitating human gestures." As this 

 might apply to almost any kind of apes, I should have 

 thought little of it, had not the brothers De Bry, whose 

 engravings illustrate the work, thought fit, in their elev- 

 enth " Argumentum," to figure two of these " Simiae 

 magnatum delicise." So much of the plate as contains 

 these apes is faithfully copied in the woodcut (fig. 1), and 

 it will be observed that they are tail-less, long-armed, 

 and large-eared ; and about the size of Chimpanzees. It 

 may be that these apes are as much figments of the 

 imagination of the ingenious brothers as the winged, two- 

 legged, crocodile-headed dragon which adorns the same 

 plate ; or, on the other hand, it may be that the artists 

 have constructed their drawings from some essentially 

 faithful description of a Gorilla or a Chimpanzee. And, 

 in either case, though these figures are worth a passing 



* Regnum Congo : hoc est Vera Descriptio Regni Africani quod tam 

 ab incolis quam Lusitanis Congus appellator, per Philippum Pigafettam, 

 olim ex Edoardo Lopez acroamatis lingua Italica excerpta, num Latio sermone 

 donata ab August. Cassiod. Reinio. Iconibus et imaginibus rerum memora- 

 bilium quasi vivis, opera et industria Joan. Theodori et Joan. Israelis de Bry, 

 fratrum exornata. Francofurti, mdxcviii. 



